


The End in the Beginning

by orphan_account



Series: Getting out alive [1]
Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Medical Inaccuracies, Past Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 20:36:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2442230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony wondered sometimes where Hill got this love of medieval weapons. Though, to be honest, they were pretty effective against undead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End in the Beginning

Tony caught Hill as she fell, her sword sliding through the head of the last undead on the street with them, blood oozing from the bullet wound on her shoulder.

"I've already calculated the trajectory, I'll look into it after I drop you back off at the tower," Tony promised hefting her up so she could stand on his toes. "Unless you want to come with?"

Hill shook her head, "I want to check the barricade when we get back." Her face was unreadable. "You do know that at some point, we're going to have to clear out the lower parts of the tower."

"I know."

She nodded in understanding, climbing off of him when they landed on the balcony, waving off his offers of assistance. Jarvis hovered, his hologram in a perpetual state of unfinished, watching as she expertly patched herself up with one hand. Tony watched until Hill bit off the last of the surgical tape she needed to hold the gauze in place, taking off back to where they had come from.

Below him, the city lay in ruins, smoke still billowing into the sky even months later. He could make out the shambling walk of the undead on the roads, scraping their way through doors and dragging along broken limbs. Tony had long since turned the telescopic setting on his helmet off. He was tired of see the faces of people he had known.

He landed on the building that the shot had come from, spotting a handful of heat signatures inside. He followed them to the fourth floor and knocked twice.

"Can you hear me?" Tony asked knocking again. "I know you're in there, so if you are not too busy, could you maybe come to the door?"

It finally edged open, a rather haggard looking man peering at him in confusion, "Iron Man?"

"Didn't you see me earlier? When you shot my friend?" Tony replied tiredly. He didn't want to be angry right now, he was tired. "Or were you just shooting in a random direction?"

The boy behind him made a noise and the man sighed, "Peter."

"Sorry Mr. Stacy." Peter started but the blonde girl half hiding behind him stepped forward.

She grabbed Mr. Stacy's arm, "It was my fault dad, the rifle went off on accident. We were playing and it slipped. I'll apologize to Iron Man."

"Wait, I'm not. You don't have to," Tony paused. "Well you kind of have to because Hill holds a grudge like no one's business. Is it, is it just you three?"

Mr. Stacy nodded, "Peter original brought his Aunt and Uncle, but they were killed with my wife and son. It's just us."

"I can clear the floor below us," Hill said scrubbing her face, her voice tinny inside the mask as he watched the Stacy's and Peter listen in, she winced when she tried to roll her shoulders back. "I think the barricade will have held and there's probably two to six undead, few enough for me to handle. Even like this."

 

 

Tony ferried the three refugees and their supplies back to Avenger's tower, letting Jarvis take over as host while he wandered down the hall to the staircase. He sighed, catching sight of the barricade still in place and slid it to the side to let him through. Hill was down the hall in the lab, standing curiously over the body of a SI employee, name badge in her hand.

"Her name was Eliza, an intern." Hill stated before ducking down to get a closer look at her corpse. "They're mutating, Stark."

"What do you mean?"

Hill prodded at what he thought were parts of skull peeking through, "This is ossification of the flesh. Look it's on the same level as her skin, I've been finding this all over the," She flinched. "Zombies on this floor."

"You don't like that word."

"Well, I'm starting to like undead even less. Stark, we have to clear the lower levels, the ossification is basically armor, what are we going to do when it spreads?"

"I'm not.."

Hill closed her eyes, "She's dead Tony. You've spent the last six months looking for a cure, I've been in contact with everyone that I can think of and no one has found anything." She rolled her good shoulder. "Pepper wouldn't want to be kept like this."

"I can't kill her, I tried."

"I'll do it then," Hill said finally. "Just, I need your help to get to your workshop. The floor below this is severely infested, Jarvis estimates thirty to forty zombies and the barricade is unsound."

Tony nodded, jerkily, "After you're healed."

Hill agreed, "Be ready by the end of the week, I'll be ready then. Now help me reinforce this barrier, if we're going to be moving people down here I want to ensure it won't break on them." She glanced at him. "We're going to move down here too, you know."

He knew. Hill had been sleeping on the couch for the last three months, sprawling across it and waking on a hair trigger, fingers clinging to the sword she had taken up when the tower had been overrun. He had joined her last month, unable to sleep more than a handful of hours in the bed that still had Pepper's things thrown across her half.

Gwen, the blonde, met them at the barricade, her eyes wide at the swath of white bandages that Jarvis had insisted Hill add after Tony left, "Dad and Peter cooked dinner."

"Thanks," Tony muttered pulling off his helmet and pressing the button to turn the suit back into a briefcase. "Hill meet Gwen Stacy. Gwen meet Deputy Director Maria Hill of SHIELD."

Hill snorted, "Not like there's much of SHIELD left." She glanced at Gwen. "You can call me Hill or Maria, I won't answer to much else these days. Nice to meet someone living."

Gwen watched her walk away and turned back to Tony, "Is she mad at me?"

"No. We," Tony shrugged. "She's insistent that we clear out the building and I've been putting it off."

"Because of the ossification?"

He blinked. "You noticed? I didn't notice until Hill did."

"Peter and I," Gwen swallowed. "I was interning at Oscorp. Peter would have been if he was better than me at science, but I beat him out for it, just barely. But he was Spiderman, before all of this."

Peter sputtered behind her, "Hey, don't go telling people my secret identity!"

"If you don't think that SHIELD wasn't already aware of who you were, Peter Parker, then you aren't as smart as we thought." Hill said joining them in loose sweatpants and a shirt that looked four sizes too big for her. "Hello again, Captain Stacy."

Stacy nodded, "Hill. How's your side of things?"

"I lost contact with the last team two months ago, you?"

"My station was gone in the third month. Dinner?"

"Please."

 

They cleared out the next floor a week later, leaving the Stacys and Parker to guard the barricade. It wasn't hard to fight their way to the barride, Hill covered them as Tony built it back up, strengthening it as he went. He waited outside his workshop as Hill dropped in from the air vents.

"She was ossifying, just like the others," Hill said walking out the doors with a dark bruise on her cheek. "And Dum-E attacks anything that comes out of the air vents. Please tell him to stop."

"Is she?" Tony asked afraid to look over her shoulder.

Hill shook her head, "I made a pyre. Her ashes are in that stupid science trophy that you made Banner get you. I sealed it." She looked uncomfortable for a moment, "You, I didn't think you could deal with the sight of her, Tony."

"Thanks," Tony licked his lips. "Want to do one last sweep before we have Jarvis search for anymore?" Hill agreed easily. "Maria, I do appreciate."

She nodded, taking off ahead of him, sword held easily before her as they went. Jarvis led them through the floor, helping them track down undead that they would have otherwise missed. Tony slowly rewired the system, fixing wires that had been broken by the undead in the aftermath.

 

"I think we should break through the floor below," Hill muttered a few weeks later, poking at the holographic blueprint that Jarvis had pulled up for her. "It was Rogers'."

Stacy blinked, "I don't understand."

"Rogers grew up in the twenties. He grew up in a time when food had to be preservable for long periods. He kept with the practice, there has to be at least enough supplies four people a couple of months. With the way he eats," She shrugged, smiling for the first time since SHIELD had fallen. "But we have to get in."

Jarvis pulled up the handful of remaining cameras on Rogers' floor, spreading them out for Hill and Stacy to see. One revealed the rubble of the barricade and the sprawl of zombies around it. Many hovered like indulgent lions, bumping into each other and walls. Twenty staggered around the staircase to the labs they had taken back.

"You're sure?" Stacy asked curiously.

Hill snorted, "As Second in Command of SHIELD, I went through anything involving the Avengers spending habits. I know that Stark likes to buy fancy whiskey and never drinks it because it's what his dad drank. I know that Hawkeye keeps twelve quivers in the air vents that he bribed out of SHIELD." Something in her tone changed as she hurried through the rest of them.

"Black Widow spends her pay on pretty things that she always wanted but couldn't have while on the run. Thor has a throne of poptarts and replaced the boxes every other day. Rogers bought fresh food because that was what he wanted, he bought canned and preserved because he's still that boy from Brooklyn."

"I would like to live with the delusion that you don't know my whole life," Tony stated looking up from where he, Peter, and Gwen had been studying one of the undead that Hill had thrown into the lab's freezers. "And you should take a look at this before you plan too much."

Gwen enlarged the pictures they had taken, her eyes glowing bright behind her reading glasses, "They're eating themselves. The ossification is their bodies pulling in the nutrients from their skin and leaving calcium behind. It won't kill them when they run out, but it will slow them down."

"It also makes them harder to kill," Peter added changing the picture. "At this point it would take a repulsor blast or a rifle to get to the brain."

"What about an axe?" Hill asked glancing at them. "Something that has heft to it? A morning star? A mace?" Her face looked excited as she leaned closer. "Heavy and spiked, it could break through armor."

"Where would we get one to test?" Stacy asked raising an eyebrow.

Hill grinned, "Leave that to me." She took off down the hall and came back a couple minutes later, a clunking bag thudding against her leg. "Here."

She pulled out a sturdy looking club with long spikes on the upper quarter, "This is a morning star, it's basically a club with spikes." A long tube came next, a touch reshaping it into a lightweight axe, that gleamed. "We were in talks with Wakanda for access to more vibratum, their king sent this to prove they had it. And this is my favorite mace." She set it on the table and shook her head when Gwen tried to lift it.

"Where do you hide this shit?" Tony asked poking at the axe. "I have access to everywhere that you do and I haven't seen this."

"My lab is a mess for a reason." Hill answered.

Gwen raised an eyebrow at her dad, "See!"

"You can not have a messy room because a secret agent does." Stacy replied. "I don't care."

Tony grinned, staring at the axe he had lodged through the ossification, "This might just work in our favor!"

 

Tony stumbled into the kitchen on Hill's heels, the smell of pancakes heavy in the air. She stopped short, her pistol leveled at the heavily scarred man in the kitchen.

"Deadpool?"

He turned and grinned, "Agent Hill! I made pancakes!"

Hill lowered her gun as Peter rushed in on their tail, jumping on Deadpool in excitement, exclaiming his relief. Gwen giggled from the doorway, her hair loose.

"Tony Stark meet Deadpool, Wade Wilson. He's unkillable."

"Really?"

"We're going to put it to the test."

Deadpool blinked at them, "But I already have!"


End file.
